Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Academics need to enter the discussion that the rest of the world engages in every day, argue Jonathan Wai and David Miller. That requires them to write in a more conversational way, they write in an article first published at, umm, The Conversation.
Douglass C. North’s contributions to economic theory have had an enormous influence on how scholars understand institutions and the process of economic change.
Academics do not simply teach and do research: they are teacher-researchers, notes Steve Fuller. In reviewing the UK spending review, he says, it is the value added to society by nurturing this complex role that should be at the forefront of the state’s thinking about the criteria used to fund universities.
Scientists in the UK are facing great uncertainty ahead of the Conservative government’s comprehensive spending review on November 25. Not only is funding for UK research under threat, the government is believed to be planning on culling many of the agencies that fund research in an effort to make savings.
The White House’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Team has done an impressive job so far in using small, inexpensive changes to make federal policies better serve citizens.
Academia has long recognized that wicked problems require cross-disciplinary research approaches, yet Australia’s Science and Research Priorities enthrall mainly STEM researchers. This divide puts academia back into silos: those on the sunny side of funding decisions and those under a constant rain cloud.
A sense of crisis is developing in economics after two Federal Reserve economists came to the alarming conclusion that economics research is usually not replicable.
Individual academics and institutions have driven the open access process in South Africa. This bottom-up approach has its merits, argue John Butler-Adam, Susan Veldsman and Ina Smith, but a push from the top is needed to ensure that the nation stays on track.